Life in a Yellow Zone
by feastguy101
Summary: The story of Darien, and of life in MidWest America from the 2030's to the 2050's.  Chapter 4 now up!
1. Karen: From Greenville to Harrisburg

**Life in a Yellow Zone**

** "Karen, no!"**

** Darien suddenly woke up, drenched in sweat. He dream't of Karen again. He knew he wouldn't be able to forget it, ever. Goddamn it. How long was it? About three years, he reckoned. Three years since that fateful day. Karen was playing outside the house at the time. The tiberium saw her, and she saw it too. All green, and shiny, and glowing, unlike anything she had ever seen before. Innocently, like all average 4 year old children would do, she walked towards the field. Darien, only 12 years old at the time, was leaving the house, going to the water tank to get some water. He too was young, but he was already old enough to know what a mortal danger tiberium was. He screamed in terror when he saw his little sister, happily playing with the green crystals. He yelled for her to get back to the house, and Karen did. He remembers thinking, "Please God, please..." But it was too late. Horrified, he saw his little sister vomit a yellow-greenhish flow of puke. It glowed, showing her fate was sealed.**

** The next thirteen days were hell. Karen got sicker and sicker, as tiberium spread trough her like an infection, growing, feeding off her defenseless body. Darien's parents tried taking her to the refugee camp's medical post, run by GDI. But as soon as they heard the word "tiberium", they backed off her. They were thrown out at gunpoint by the scared GDI medical staff. Having lost all hope, they took her home... and waited for the end. On the fifth day, Karen started to have problems talking, her voice getting raspy as tiberium spread to her vocal cords. Her eyes started to get green, and by the ninth day, her tears, wich, in horrible pain, she shed constantly, started to flow green. In the end, all that was left of her was a mix of tiberium and horribly mutated flesh. She became a visceroid.**

** Not long after that, GDI evacuated their people out of Greenville, leaving all the civilians behind. Abandoning them to their fate. Darien ran away from his haunted home and family about a week later. Desperate and grieving, he joined the endless flow of tiberium refugees going east, fleeing from the ever expanding tiberium. From the ground, he saw the GDI Orca transports carrying soldiers, guns, or the few people who were lucky enough to reach an airfield not yet abandoned by GDI. One day, he saw one of the transports go down, crashing behind a berm nearby. After two hours of walking, his barefooted feet bleeding from the rocks and shell casings, he reached the crash site, hoping to find some food, or water. Among the burned bodies of the passengers, he saw someting different, but equally precious: a gun. In this case, a GDI Mark II assault rifle. He picked it up, putting the rifle on is back, and picked up a bandoleer containing a few rounds. It was the first gun he ever had. Barely did he knew it would be the first of many. He booted it back to the blown out road and kept walking east. Blown out tanks and APC's were visible in the landscape, and a few burned out cars were scattered along the now unused road. The remaints of a once prosperous american life, now destroyed by tiberium and war, seemed to taunt him as he walked up the road. He eventually reached an old sign, saying: "Harrisburg, 3 miles"**

** He finnally arrived at Harrisburg in mid-October 2034, a 13 year old boy with an assault rifle in his skinny hands, starved like hell. He was stunned by what he saw. Whatever remaining order the city had when GDI was present had disapeared when they moved out to the Blue Zones. Harrisburg, once inhabited by some 5.000 people, seemed to be home to about ten times that number, with the city having descended into complete anarchy. Between the blasted, bombed buildings, firefights between numerous factions, trying to take over the ruins of the city, could be heard. Tiberium was still far from the city, but not far enough the weather wasn't affected by it. The once prosperous farmland surrounding the city had turned into a desert, devoid of life, and the once blue sky was filled with strange, almost dust-like yellow clouds. Harrisburg consisted of the city center, bombed beyond recognition during the Second Tiberium War, made of a cross shaped speedway with a few side streets leading out of it, and the slums, a ring of shacks and tents surrounding Harrisburg proper.**


	2. First Blood

**Darien walked right into it, and after five minutes of walking, in the middle of a slum's back alley, he saw two men walking towards him. He put his left hand in the barrel of his rifle, while seeing one of the shady, dirty men take a nasty looking knife out of his overcoat pocket, moving towards him. He held is rifle and pointed at the man.**

** "Ah! You don't have the guts, kid. Now let go of that rifle, or I'll tear you to bits!"**

** "Get the fuck away from me, or I swear to God I'll kill you" Darien said, clicking the gun's safety off. The man jumped towards him.**

** Darien, terrified, barely heard the two shots he fired from his Mark II. The first shot caught the man in the left shoulder, the explosive round blasting his arm off it's socket. As he moved, screaming in pain, the second shot blew the top of his head off, splashing his brains in the face of the second guy, who had come closer. The fist man fell to the ground with a smooth "thump", creating a large pool of blood in the dirt. The other crook, caught by surprise, started moving backwards, pleading for his life.**

** "Don't shoot, I beg you! I have a wife and two kids, please!" he screamed.**

** "Fuck you", Darien tought, and shot him three times in the gut, one time for his wife and two times for his kids. The guy, entrails blown apart, fell near the other man, blood pouring out like a red river. Darien looked blankly at the first humans he killed in his life, then went through their pockets. He found two cans of Nod rations, a .45 pistol, of a GDI model he didn't recognize, a keychain with a key saying "Callaway Ave, 12", and about 100 dollars. The guy who held the knife (which he also took) had a tattoo saying "Harrisburg Fiends" on his left forearm. He also wore boots that had Darien's number, so Darien, who had walked more than forty miles barefooted, took the boots from the bloody corpse and put them on. "I guess I should check out this adress", he tought, while reloading his rifle. He started moving towards the town center.**

** Just as he got out of the slums, he heard shots coming from the main road. He ran towards a side street, drawing his weapon and took cover behind an old, half burned dumpster. Explosions rocked the walls as a heavy gunfight erupted from a distance. "Jesus Christ, what now?!" he tought. First those two assholes he shot. Then those little punks who laughed at him, when he found an eye on top of his head and screamed like a girl. Then the look that woman gave him when she saw the blood on his face while he was asking her for directions. Now this firefight. Darien figured two gangs were fighting each other for control of the road. He sat behind the dumpster and waited, with the pistol in his right hand, waiting to shoot any ganster who might find him. Thirty minutes later, the shots stopped. He got up and headed to Callaway.**


	3. Home, new Home

**When he turned the street, a burning, half vandalized Titan and at least twenty corpses, laying in a pool of blood and gore, were left on the street's berms. A few civilians were also rotting away in the remnants of an old cafe, now riddled with bullets and the scars of the TW2 bombings. An old man, whose legs layed not far from the rest of his body, a woman, her brains blown off, still holding a half burned baby against her chest... "I don't want to." Darien tought. **

** "I don't want to." he said, tears starting to flow from his dusty face.**

** "I don't want to!" he screamed into the now empty street, falling on his knees, now crying, crying for everything, his sister, the people in the Orca, those two thugs he shot, for the gang members dead in the street, for the old man, the mother, the baby; the baby whose life had been violated, taken even before it began.**

** "AAAAGHHH!" something heavy suddenly reached the sky, coming from the deepest of his bowels, and kept coming, so strong it seemed to tear him apart.**

** When he came to his senses, he didn't know how long he stayed like that. Seemed to him like a lifetime. He suddenly became aware of his surroundings, and his self-preservation instincts kicked in. He had to go... where?... right, Callaway Ave, number 12, for shelter, food, water, bed... rest. Where was he? He looked around. A row of decrepit, orange 2 story houses lined to his right. To his left, across the street from the cafe, the dacaying ruins of a convenience store, looted a long time ago, stood next to the ruins of a 6 story office building. According to a half destroyed sign, it had been the "Harris...ular Bank". Paving the sidewalks, a few leftovers of white bricks stood in the middle of the ashes and dirt.**

** From the woman's description, this was Callaway Avenue. He started looking to the houses. Some of those still had the number hanging from their lamps, over the doors. He noticed a lot of those doors seemed to be made of gold colored armor composite, probably looted from downed GDI aircraft. He started checking the numbers.**

** "2, 6, 8, ah, here we go, 12."**

** He looked at his new home. It seemed to be the average in that street. An old orange house, the painting half burned off by the bombing that had ocurred on the other side of the street. The windows were boarded up, the stairs to the door seemed to no longer exist, and trash along with human and animal waste filled the sides of what probably had been a small front lawn. A tree, seemingly dead for a long time, stood on the left side of the improvised landfill.**

** "Well" he said, "at least it's not the slums."**

** "Ah!" he tought. "More like a ghetto."**

** Darien walked towards the door (wich, along with a few of the other houses, was made from a looted GDI steel plate locked with a large chain. A lock hanged from the chain. Darien unlocked it and entered his new home.**

** On the inside, the place looked even more miserable. The second story seemed to be reduced to the outer walls and the roof, and the floor had long disappeared. In the ground floor, the remaints of an old life remained scattered around: a cracked bathtub, that looked like it hadn't been used for the last 15 years, some half destroyed furniture in the living room, made of a burned up sofa, a TV stand (no TV, tough), and a coffee table missing a leg, with a 2032 Time magazine with half of it's pages ripped off. In what used to be the kitchen, a Nod style generator, running on some form of liquid tiberium fuel, provided the place with electricity.**

** The basement, however, seemed to have been turned into some sort of air raid shelter, containing a good looking bed that seemed to be military-issue, a steel armoire with a few clothes in it, and there was a small, old-fashioned boxy TV in one of the corners. No toilet, and no shower. Darien turned on the TV. The emission was blank. He kept pressing the eight buttons, one by one, picking up a very shaky GDI transmission (probably NYBZNN, the New York Blue Zone News Network) on channel five and a clear brocast from ARRTV, the Nod sponsored Alabama Revolutionary Republic Television. He turned the TV off, went upstairs to lock the door behind him, and layed down on the bed.**


	4. Oakdale

Meanwhile, far away from Harrisburg and Darien, a small crisis, typical of those days, was developing. In Oakdale, near an under construction section of the future B-2 Tiberium Containment Barrier, commonly known as tibwalls, a massive crowd of desperate refugees were trying to get past the GDI security barriers. Many refugees, traveling many miles on foot, were now in front of one of the rising barriers that would divide the great and the awful regions of the former United States for generations to come. Under a heavy rainstorm, the massive wave of refugees saw their path to security barred by two GDI infantry companies. As time went by, the increasingly desperate horde of helpless people started to turn to violence in an effort to get inside the Blue Zone. Shots were fired, and a GDI soldier fell to the floor. GDI soldiers, in panic, opened fire along the line. The crowd turned to flee, stampeding away from the tibwall. Among those fleeing, taking refuge inside a destroyed office building, was a young man, with dark green eyes and blonde hair. His name was Thomas, until that point another nameless refugee, and, hidden behind the remnants of an office desk, he saw the crowd fleeing for their lives, crushing each other in the process. While seeing the gruesome faces of those being trampled, a hatred for GDI flickered and lit, forever, a strong flame in is mind.

About two hours later, the roar of the crowd and sound of shooting died down. In the dead of the night, Thomas wandered between the fresh corpses. There were a lot of corpses. Some were seemingly intact, some beaten to a bloody pulp, and a few still riddled with bullet holes. They layed all over the street leading uphill into the security fence, by the hundreds, maybe thousands. But no one was counting, and Thomas ran from the grotesque scene, downhill, away from GDI, away from warnings blasted trough speakers. Near the end of the street, he saw a tall man, waving at him. As he headed towards him, the man pulled him into what used to be a cellar, urging him to stay quiet.

"What the fuck! Let go of me! Who are you?"

"Just shut up for now, man, if a GDI patrol hears you, we're all royally fucked! Just get in and stay in the shadows."

Trough the low windows of the cellar, They saw a GDI Wolverine pass trough and turn towards the uphill street he just got out of. The mechanical feet of the Wolverine crushed the dead refugee's bodies as it moved forward, the pilot not bothering to change it's course.

"Fucking animals" Thomas muttered.

"Don't worry, man, they'll pay for what they done today soon enough" the man answered, "by the way, I'm Henrique Garcia. Squad Corporal Garcia, 22nd Militia Company, 3rd Nod Army."


End file.
